Friday, May 4, 2007

You're not going to get a whole lot of seriousness out of me today, I'm afraid. One of the memes I enjoy seeing on blogs is the Friday Random Ten, in which bloggers open up their music player of choice, hit 'shuffle', and list the top ten songs in their queue. Here's my first try at this, with a quick caveat: I cheat. You see, my music collection is not actually a reflection of the music I listen to. Every time I get my grubby little hands on a CD, I pop it in my CD drive and add it to my iTunes library, before I even listen to it. It's like a compulsion. Add to that the fact that I never ever ever delete any music file ('cause I'm weird like that), and you get a whole steaming pile of crap I never listen to. Since the whole point of the random ten thingy is, I think, to give people an idea of what a blogger's taste in music is like, I only list music on my shuffle list that I've actually listened to at least once without skipping past it or making pathetic little gagging noises. So here you go, my Friday Not-So-Random Ten:

Thursday, May 3, 2007

As I mentioned before, I'm on the Worldview Weekend mailing list. Well, a few days ago I got an email referring me to this article by Rebecca Hagelin, hyping up a new magazine called Salvo, and denigrating pornography. Same old, same old for these asshats, but I endeavored to write up a post eviscerating the nonsensical claims anyway.

But I kinda petered out halfway through. I've seen the same old "porn hurts families, people get addicted to nekkid pictures, female nipple tissue is a magical thing that will corrupt anyone who sees it" so many times that I could probably write a response to that kind of screed in my sleep. (Although the magazine article referenced was pretty slick.)

So I started looking for another angle, and clicked on the responses to Hagelin's article. And guess what? The author, who wrote the following:

After reading the second issue of Salvo, I’m happy to report that the first issue was just the beginning of a media revolution. The editors and writers continue to challenge the liberal orthodoxy that infects our modern culture, dissecting the “conventional wisdom” with a wit and a wisdom that’s rare in the public square.

The editors take a clear-eyed look at a culture awash in sex, where the popular media encourages our youth to wallow in everything from the mire of pornography addiction to “gender ambiguity” (the très chic notion that one can be both male and female).

Salvo is so jam-packed with information, much of it in eye-catching, bite-sized chunks (not unlike the Internet), that it would be impossible for me to cover everything in this latest issue. So let me spotlight a couple of features that, for me, exemplify the reason Salvo really stands out and accomplishes things that few other publications do.

...is actually on the fucking editorial board of the fucking magazine. You can check it: go here and click on "masthead." (Sorry no direct link, but the queefstains who run the site do everything in Flash, making it impossible to actually, y'know, use the goddamned site like a regular webpage.) Hagelin's name is right there, smack in the middle of the Advisory Board.

Apparently, Hagelin's been all over the conservative portions of the web, hyping this great new magazine with nary a mention of her own involvement. Wonder how much money she's made off of this little ethical lapse?

I'd much rather hang out with an honest porn star than such a sack of peanut-filled shit, anyway. I'll be over here watching Xtube (NSFW) videos and checking out Sophie Howard's (again, NSFW) many pictorials in Loaded if anyone needs me.

Let's kick things off with an email that carries with it the stench of xenophobia, religious intolerance, racism, and oh, a subtle touch of CRAZY. I introduce to you a dire warning of the terror that is Barack Obama:

Who is Barack Obama?

Probable U. S. presidential candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black Muslim from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and Ann Dunham, a white atheist from Wichita, Kansas. Obama's parents met at the University of Hawaii.

When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced. His father returned to Kenya. His mother then married Lolo Soetoro, a radical Muslim from Indonesia. When Obama was 6 years old, the family relocated to Indonesia. Obama attended a Muslim school in Jakarta. He also spent two years in a Catholic school.

Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim. He is quick to point out that, "He was once a Muslim, but that he also attended Catholic school."

Obama's political handlers are attempting to make it appear that Obama's introduction to Islam came via his father, and that this influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya soon after the divorce, and never again had any direct influence over his son's education. Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, introduced his stepson to Islam. Obama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the radical teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world.

Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when seeking major public office in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background.

Oh, wingnut, please. Do you really think we don't know how to get down wit Snopes Dawg?

Ok, so let's set aside for the moment the fact that Obama has never been and is not now a Muslim, or that his childhood school was not a madrassa. Ignore for a second that this entire email is based on a pack of lies. The insidiousness of this missive lies in its willingness to exploit wingnuts' fears of social, religious and ethnic minorities. Why mention that Obama's middle name is "Hussein"? What does the fact that his mother was a white woman who married a black man have to do with anything, or for that matter, that she was an atheist? So his birth father was raised in a Muslim tradition. So Obama went to school in a predominately-Muslim country. So frickin' what? None of that has any bearing on his ability to hold public office, and everything to do with agitating the ultra-conservatives who are afraid of people who aren't as white as mayonaisse sandwiches. Hell, I'm so white I glow in the dark, but even I wouldn't pass the sniff test with these people, because it isn't all about race (thought that is a large part of it) : it is about the white, conservative, middle-American Christian ideal that politicians must either aspire to or pay homage to in some way in order to get elected in this sick culture of ours. And that, my friends, is why we are in such a freakin' mess these days: we've elected TV preachers to do the job of running our country.

Pinky and I were talking today about how we get a bunch of fucking email from fucking wingnut asshats. And since we're pretty creative when coming up with ways of taking these guys down a peg or two, we've decided to start up a little blog dedicated to deconstructing all the stupid email forwards and the like that we get on a regular basis.